Introduction to Qualitative Methods A

Course Code: PUBLG004A

Course Tutor:Dr Alexandra Hartman (Department of Political Science)

Assessment: One 3,000 word assignment

Credit Value: 15

About this course

This
course is required of all students pursuing an MSc from the School of Public
Policy, including degrees in Democracy and Comparative Politics, European Public
Policy, Global Governance and Ethics, International Public Policy, Public
Policy and Security Studies. MA Human Rights students may also opt to take
this course as their compulsory research methods option. As an alternative to this course, students may opt
to take Advanced Qualitative Research Methods (PUBLG105) should they prefer.

Is
gay marriage more likely to attract public support if politicians talk about it
in terms of “family values”? Are prisoners who are detained in facilities that
offer educational programmes less likely to offend on their release? Even
though there is a strong correlation between a region’s wealth and its child
mortality rates, why do some regions, like Kerala, manage to buck the trend and
deliver high infant survival rates despite being very poor? How do people
living in East London make sense of the changes in their lives and local area
since hosting the Olympic Games? What sorts of national identities are
constructed by discourses on Scottish and Welsh devolution?

This
course won’t give you the answers to these questions. But it will give you the
tools to design research that could help you answer them yourself – and all
sorts of other important questions of interest to policy-makers, politicians
and academics alike. All of these questions are, like many of the questions
facing policy-makers, quite difficult to answer using only numbers and
statistical techniques. Like many political questions, they require us to deal
with meanings, values, language, processes and experiences. Research about
these important areas of human political life is what we will how learn to do
on this course.

The
course is designed with the goal of introducing students to different
qualitative methods that may be used by social scientists and policy researchers,
including case studies, interviews, focus groups, ethnography, content
analysis, survey research and discourse analysis. We start by looking at some of the
philosophical assumptions underlying different types of qualitative research
and then we will move on to develop and practise the skills needed to design,
carry out, analyse and evaluate all these different research strategies.

By
the end of the course, students should be well-equipped to understand the
methods employed in political and social research, and to evaluate the use of
these methods in answering questions about politics. Additionally, after
completing the module, students should feel equipped to use these methods (if
appropriate) in their own dissertations and in their subsequent careers.